> sorry to lump you in with the fringe.I'll look for the link later on....it's difficult tracking stuff down on this topic. The web is filled with stuff. I'm off to Darwin Day celebrations.Cheers to science prevailing over ideology--that we can all agree on.

Cheers Nate, and no offence taken. I've been called quite a lot of names and have been given enough tinfoil hats to keep me in stove windshields for life. Charles Darwin suffered a lot of abuse for standing up for the science he believed in too. His ideas about evolution didn't just go against religion but other 'scientific ideas' of the day such as Lamarckian inheritance.

The scientific establishment can be as conservative as the bishops when it comes to clinging onto ideas which have outlived their usefulness. Long held belief in veritable institutions such as the peer review process (more like pal review process in the case of the climate clique) need a makeover in the internet age, where a greater number of well informed and able minds can be quickly brought to bear on the fruits of new research. This way, errors in data collation and flaws in methodology can be quickly spotted before they lead to erroneous large scale assumptions and bad theory.

>Personally I think it is all made up BS in an attempt to make more money, but just because I think something doesnt mean its true. In our tiny little world we try and make a difference.

Hi Ali e,Love your boat. I lived on a 1926 teak built navy launch for seven years. I admire your efforts to go offgrid. I'm trying to do the same. Haven't run a car for over a year (got a motorbike and an electric bike though), grow my own veg, and I'm working on smallscale battery charging systems too.

I mainly try to avoid getting embroiled in the politics of global warming because it muddies the waters and leads to endless argument about issues which have no 'correct' answer. Having said that, I feel as strongly about things as Roger C.

I will limit myself to a couple of informative observations and leave it at that without further comment.

1) Al gore is a non exec director of Kliener Perkins, an investment company with interests in among other things, Google, Clean Tech startup companies working on 'carbon sequestration technologies'. 2)K.P. are very well connected with the old establishment, as the following graphic shows.Warning: This graphic was produced using Microsoft(tm) paint

3)Stanford University is Global Warming Alarm! central.It's home to Stephen Schneider, professor (by courtesy) of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He also happens to be one of the IPCC lead authors who produces the periodic Global Warming Alarm! documents (not peer reviewed) which are used to 'inform' the policy makers of the worlds governments.At one of his lectures he says this to the assembled climate scientists:

""We need to get some broad based support,to capture the public's imagination...So we have to offer up scary scenarios,make simplified, dramatic statementsand make little mention of any doubts...Each of us has to decide what the right balanceis between being effective and being honest."

Forgive me if I get VERY blunt here. YOU CAN'T STOP AN AUSTRALIAN BUSHFIRE!

Quite right RogerC. It doesn't help when people start them deliberately either.http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090213/ap_on_re_au_an/as_australia_wildfires"Words can't describe how I feel about them," Halyburton told The Associated Press at a relief center in nearby Alexandra. "I'm a Christian, but I don't think to kindly of people if they go light a match and destroy people's property and lives. They don't have a brain in their head."

It's the third time I've asked, but what on earth motivates people to do this? Some wierd misanthropic streak? Secret notoriety? Beats me.

"Forgive me if I get VERY blunt here. YOU CAN'T STOP AN AUSTRALIAN BUSHFIRE!"

This from The Age:

"Of all the speakers who addressed the meeting, it was Arthurs Creek CFA Captain David McGahy who got the most rousing reception.

Choking back tears he told them: "I'm so terribly sorry. We desperately wanted to protect you but we couldn't.

"In the cold analysis of light, it wouldn't have mattered if we'd have had 200 units here, all that would have happened is we would have ended up with a whole lot of dead firefighters. I've been at this game for about 40 years and I haven't experienced anything like that, not even remotely like it.""

"Meanwhile, investigators confirmed that the fire that wiped out the town of Marysville and nearby Narbethong, killing up to 100 people, began around 2.30pm last Saturday near the abandoned Murrindindi sawmill, south of Yea.

Forensic examination indicates the fire was deliberately lit. Police appealed for anyone who visited a popular swimming and camping spot near the mill site in Wilhelmina Falls Road on Saturday to contact them urgently.

Detective Superintendent Paul Hollowood of the Phoenix taskforce said: "We believe the mill site is ground zero. ... This was not an attempt to burn down the mill but a deliberate attempt to create a bushfire on a massive scale.""

Ah, conspiracy theories. I can entertain the idea that global warming may not be as serious as scientists suspect, but I laugh at the conspiracy theorists. BTW, did you hear that the US government blew up the twin towers?

The diagram is rather amusing. Especially comments like "PageRank hype". The fundamental idea behind PageRank is not hype at all. If the conspiracy theorist who drew the diagram had actually been on the internet prior to 2001 then they would know how crap search engines were before google came along. I remember it clearly... it was a revelation. You could actually find what you were looking for. Entirely due to the PageRank algorithm. Since then google have just been making money off of it.

Anyway, I'm no google fan-boy, but I do think it ridiculous to link PageRank to global warming (not as a cause, but in a conspiracy). Hilarious really!

Hi Ashley,there is no conspiracy theory here. The only person talking about a link between google and global warming here, is you. The facts about Gore's directorship of Kleiner Perkins and their interests in companies which will benefit from the policies he is promoting are documented and out in the open. The way some people try to obfuscate the issue and rubbish those who highlight the facts makes me laugh. Hilarious really!

Your page rank diagram is THE definition of a conspiracy theory. It is a conspiracy you are alleging--multiple actors engaged in nefarious activity to further their own interests. And it is a theory--you have no evidence whatsoever that google is tweaking it's page rank algorithm to benefit global warming theorists.

Easy William. Ashley is trying to imply that I'm linking google and global warming. I'm not. It's just that the diagram usefully shows the links between Kleiner Perkins, the old establishment, and peripherally, stanford university.

"I do think it ridiculous to link PageRank to global warming (not as a cause, but in a conspiracy)"

Note the bit in brackets -- not as a cause, but in a conspiracy!

So, no, I'm not implying that you suggested google is somehow a cause of or encouraging global warming. What I meant was, and Nate understood it, I find it nuts that Google pagerank (or even google!) appears in a conspiracy about global warming...

If that diagram is not a conspiracy theory then I don't know what is. As I said before, I can entertain scientific arguments, but outlandish conspiracy theories have as much credibility as the mysteries of twin towers, man on the moon, Roswell etc. etc.

"The climate is heating up far faster than scientists had predicted, spurred by sharp increases in greenhouse gas emissions from developing countries like China and India, a top climate scientist said on Saturday.

"The consequence of that is we are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we've considered seriously," Chris Field, a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.

Field said "the actual trajectory of climate change is more serious" than any of the climate predictions in the IPCC's fourth assessment report called "Climate Change 2007.""

William, Chris Field is one of the stanford university global-warming-alarm! IPCC authors in Stephen Schneiders team.

He also claimed some years ago that wheat yields were going to fall because of global warming. This claim is debunked here:http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/BBC_IPCC_Field.htm

The Hysteria frenzy being whipped up by 'The Team' is an attempt to keep the pot boiling until legislation is passed, and before mother nature proving their doom-mongering wrong becomes obvious - even to politicians.

After their piece blaming global warming for the Victoria bushfires on the 10th feb quoted by Roger Caffin on this thread, it looks like the Sydney Morning herald has decided the fence is the best place to sit.

It wasn't climate change which killed as many as 300 people in Victoria last weekend. It wasn't arsonists. It was the unstoppable intensity of a bushfire, turbo-charged by huge quantities of ground fuel which had been allowed to accumulate over years of drought. It was the power of green ideology over government to oppose attempts to reduce fuel hazards before a megafire erupts, and which prevents landholders from clearing vegetation to protect themselves.

So many people need not have died so horribly. The warnings have been there for a decade. If politicians are intent on whipping up a lynch mob to divert attention from their own culpability, it is not arsonists who should be hanging from lamp-posts but greenies.

Governments appeasing the green beast have ignored numerous state and federal bushfire inquiries over the past decade, almost all of which have recommended increasing the practice of "prescribed burning". Also known as "hazard reduction", it is a methodical regime of burning off flammable ground cover in cooler months, in a controlled fashion, so it does not fuel the inevitable summer bushfires.

In July 2007 Scott Gentle, the Victorian manager of Timber Communities Australia, who lives in Healesville where two fires were still burning yesterday, gave testimony to a Victorian parliamentary bushfire inquiry so prescient it sends a chill down your spine.

"Living in an area like Healesville, whether because of dumb luck or whatever, we have not experienced a fire … since … about 1963. God help us if we ever do, because it will make Ash Wednesday look like a picnic." God help him, he was right.

So, I sneak out of the trenches a while back for an extended filial leave, and as I'm being escorted back to the battle, I find new conscripts, new weapons and new fronts. General Dave T can't be happy with the activity!

Can you bring me up to speed? I am familiar with your use of words hysteria, frenzy, whipped, boiling, doom-mongering, and "even politicians", (used in one sentence of of a recent post), in your quest to shine the light of day on climate science, but I've missed the training on the use of the word "subject" as used by Roger C. in this sentence

>Edit: on rereading this, it seems that I have some strong feelings on the subject. Ah well...

and your connection to that word "subject" in a subsequent post that included the following:

>I mainly try to avoid getting embroiled in the politics of global warming because it muddies the waters and leads to endless argument about issues which have no 'correct' answer. Having said that, I feel as strongly about things as Roger C.

I'm confused about the "things" and "subjects" that "you two" feel strongly about, and have strong feelings about. Is it perhaps the use of of phrases like "the terrifying face of climate change" and "desiccation of the landscape" and the casual, simplistic, and unscientific causal connections between extreme weather and climate that some irresponsible people and publications often make. You know, like connecting record or extended hot, cold, dry, wet, etc weather with climate.

Hi Skots! welcome back to the thread. :-)To be honest, it seemed like my unanswered questions about the science weren't going to get answered, so we took a bit of a timeout for more general banter about the issues.

But now you're back, I hope we can revisit those scientific questions and redeem the thread's more serious purpose.

Your point above, about weather and climate would be a good place to start maybe. As you said before you took time off, "let's stick with the ice for a while". There plenty of it about for us to talk about this winter. ;-)

Miranda represents the extremist end of the extreme right wing anti-green anti-conservation movement. I knew her when she was much younger; how she got from there to where she is now I really do not know!

"Miranda represents the extremist end of the extreme right wing anti-green anti-conservation movement."

Sadly, compared to the denizens of the website Rog directed us to a couple of days ago she's a beacon of balance and reason.

And I'm still waiting for someone to identify the green group or individual councillors who brought in rules forbidding people from clearing rubbish from around their homes or who are not in favour of cool-burn fuel reduction.

I'm also still waiting for The Age to identify the "experts" they keep referring to who say that building fire-resistant houses will increase housing prices "by $20,000". More anonymous scaremongering by the HIA I suspect.

>Sadly, compared to the denizens of the website Rog directed us to a couple of days ago she's a beacon of balance and reason.

That'd be the site voted "best science blog 2008" Then. whatsupwiththat.com got 10 times more votes than realclimate.org :-)Not that it proves anything, except where the groundswell of public opinion is heading perhaps. Last year, realclimate tied with climateaudit.org another 'sceptic' site, which is a bit more highbrow in it's approach (the blog owner co-wrote a few papers with an IPCC reviewer).

I agree things were out of hand on that thread though. There are some interesting and informative discussions on topics with a bit less emotional heat than the Victoria fires.

>I'm still waiting for someone to identify the green group or individual councillors who brought in rules forbidding people from clearing rubbish from around their homes or who are not in favour of cool-burn fuel reduction.

The guy on that thread who got fined 100,000AUD for creating a viable firebreak round his home might be able to supply a few names. I note you commented on that thread that there are plenty of unforested parts of australia he could go to live. How would you feel if you were told to leave the area your family grew up in because you wanted to keep them safe from wildfire?

I seem to recall he said he had thousands of trees on his land, and he cut down 247 to create the firebreak which saved his home and family while homes burned nearby. Considering how fast eucalyptus grows, it seems like perfectly reasonable forest management to me.

Someone else commented that the aborigines have used controlled burn since god knows when. Is that true?